The Secret Doctrine – 1554 pages to go

Six hundred and seventy-six pages in the first volume entitled Cosmogenesis. Seven hundred and ninety-eight pages in the second volume – Anthropogenesis. That would be fourteen hundred and seventy four pages to read, not counting the Preface, tables of contents for each volume, Introductory (31 pages), the Proem (24 pages) and preliminary notes of the second volume. When its all added up its fifteen hundred and fifty-nine pages plus.

How long would it take to read it straight through? If I read five pages a day for a year, that would more than cover it. I suppose that I might miss a day here and there, or read more on some days than others.

I read the Publishers Preface which is saying that this edition of 1964 is an exact replica of the original edition of 1888. They say the genuine Secret Doctrine has only two volumes, (even though H.P.B. said four were written and two are withheld). This edition has the two volumes bound together into one book.

“This work is Dedicated to all True Theosophists, in every Country, and of every Race, for they called it forth, and for them it was recorded.”

How did they call it forth? Was it by a yearning in the heart to know and a readiness for it to be received? It is said that “When the student is ready the teacher will appear”.

Was this a time when there enough people with sufficient capacity to understand and benefit from esoteric teaching of this kind? Was there a need to bring eastern and western thought together?

HPB tells us that none of the knowledge contained in this book is new, but that it is a synthesis of esoteric knowledge “scattered throughout thousands of volumes embodying the scriptures of Asiatic and early European religions hidden under glyph and symbol and hitherto left unnoticed because of this veil.” (preface – vol. I)

She says she wrote this book to show that “Nature is not a fortuitous concurrence of atoms “; to rescue the archaic truths and uncover the unity from which they all come; and to show the occult side of nature, a subject which had never been approached by the modern science of her day.